A Good Book Is Hard to Find

Apologies to Flannery O'Connor.

Grace's reading has blossomed in an amazing way this summer since kindergarten ended. She actually sits with a book and just reads independently, by herself, absorbed in book after book after book. It is such a joy to see her become a reader; it makes some deep part of me happy to see her become totally engaged with a book and just want to READ. Also, I will admit to a bit of jealousy as I am not reading as much as I want to be, or as much as I did as a girl, or a single person, or a woman with no children. In this season of life with my three little ones, I read for fun about as much as I did during grad school, which is not really enough.

We've always done reading aloud and we stick to lovely worthwhile classics for those, books that we love that we are so glad we can share for the first time with Grace. Right now Rob is reading through the Narnia series to her, a chapter a time, before she goes to bed. We can't wait to start Harry Potter, and Ballet Shoes, and The Cricket in Times Square, and so forth... I am having a harder time finding books that are just right for her to read by herself, though. She is just at the cusp of being able to read chapter books. The early reader books we have (you know, those paperbacks that star a character like Amelia Bedelia or Eloise but are not the original works) are starting to lose their appeal for her, and she occasionally still enjoys plowing through a pile of picture books, but those options not really challenging to her or moving her skills forward. On the other hand, most of the classic children's chapter books that I think are so wonderful are still a bit too hard for her to read independently. I feel like she's in a challenging in-between place right now.

The great discovery of the summer has been the Magic Tree House series. I think I saw these books mentioned briefly on someone's blog as a good introductory chapter book and BOY, was that person right. They are somehow perfectly designed to appeal to Grace at her current reading ability and developmental stage. She LOVES them. She has finished the entire first series since school let out and is well on her way to catching up to all the ones in the second series that are currently published before school starts again at the end of August. They aren't what one would call great literature but they aren't junk-y vacuous books either. (Ask me sometime about the Barbie book that Grace brought home once from the school library. ANGRY PARENTS.) I have taken to requesting about four at once from the library and depending on how busy our schedule is, she will finish all of them within 48 hours of us picking them up at the library.

So here I am, crowd-sourcing some suggestions for books for her to read. What else would be good for a newly-independent reader just taking her first steps into chapter books? The Magic Tree House series is about as far as I'm willing to go when it comes to lack of real literary merit. I'd prefer for her to read books of real value and beauty, but age-appropriate appeal is important too. I got some of the non-fiction "research guides" that the Magic Tree House people put out to go along with their books but she struggled to get through those and did not enjoy them at all; reading became WORK again. I know that eventually we all have to read things that are hard to get through but that is not what I'm looking for right now for Grace. I really want her to love Frog and Toad and Little Bear but much to my (hopefully well-hidden from Grace) disappointment they just haven't grabbed her in the way Magic Tree House has. I guess a related question to my main one above is how can I make Grace love Maurice Sendak?

Faces

Lewis is 10 months old (well, 11 months as of tomorrow) and I think he looks so much like Grace at the same age; what do you think?





I feel like Lewis reminds me so much of Grace at the same age in his mannerisms and expressions and whatnot as well. Genetics are so interesting! And here is what Grace looks like now, about six year later, with her adorable lack of front teeth:



There was such DRAMA involved in the removal of these teeth. Grace is very sensitive about physical pain and does not have a lot of toughness in her. When she lost her bottom front teeth, she let us "help" them along a little but she really freaked out about the pain and the little bit of blood and whatnot. This time around, she would barely let us touch them and she basically waited until they fell out, but in the meantime there was lots of drama about how they hurt when they wiggled and so forth. And oh, how sickeningly loose they were at the end... The second one to go could rotate almost 90 degrees on the last day. SHUDDER. I much prefer her now with her charming big gap.

I do love taking photographs of people, my small children or whoever. I went to a portrait photography workshop that our friend Mike organized last weekend and had such a fun time. We talked about making portraits for a while and then went outside and shot a bunch of portraits of each other using just our phones. I brought Grace with me because Mike had said it was open to all ages. When I first broached the idea to her, she said, "Mom, I already know how to take pictures of people," but when I explained it a little more she decided she would like to come. She took my new profile picture up there in the corner. Here are some of my favorite ones that I shot that day:













What a fun day...

What Is Saving My Life Right Now

This post is part of the synchroblog that Sarah Bessy is hosting, inspired by this lovely post she wrote yesterday.

My gorgeous squishy baby boy. I give him baths in our kitchen sink and he splashes in the bubbles with his sweet beautiful bare arms and legs. I nurse him to sleep at night, his ears perfect pink shells and his breath even and deep. We had rain the other night, something you really stop and notice in this arid valley, and we could both smell the summer rain through the open window as he drifted off to sleep. 

Rob's daily presence in my life. I really can't say enough times or with enough emphasis how wonderful it is to have Rob finished with his medical training. He is available, home, here more now than he has been since before Grace was born. We went from years of 80-hour work weeks to suddenly when we moved here he works 4 days a week. I am still so thankful, now two years into this phase of his career.

Organizing, cleaning, purging. Baby boy clothes are ready to go to a friend with a littler baby than mine, little girl clothes are packed in a box to send to a friend one state away who doesn't think homemade clothes are strange, my email inbox seldom contains above five items, and I did a giant cull of my RSS reader to only keep the things that matter to me, the things that really make my life happier.

Employment. It's looking like I will soon join the ranks of the gainfully employed. This week I was offered a job writing astronomy content for an online education company. It's part-time, flexible hours, working remotely, etc and I think it is going to work out.

The pleasures of summer food. Cold-brewed coffee, apricots and berries, rosé wine, lemon cucumbers, slaws and salads, anything grilled outside.

The promise of honestly cool weather in another 6-8 weeks. Summer in Utah is beautiful in ways summer has never been for me elsewhere, and it is blessedly not too long.

Reading a summer-y novel in stolen minutes here and there. It was great. I need to read more.

Beautiful children's bodies in swimsuits, full of joy, utterly lacking self-consciousness.

Grace sprawled on the couch absorbed in book after book from the library.

The way Violet pronounces "marshmallow".

Playing piano.

YouVersion.

Naps.

The Days Can Be Long But the Years Are Short

We are nearing the end of July and the summer is swimming by like Grace swims by me in her lane at the community pool at her lessons. Life with three little ones is so FULL-- full of noise, full of neediness, full of demands, full of joy, full of love. The days can stretch out so long, and when one or more of these children has a particularly bad night I sometimes get out of bed in the morning looking forward to going to sleep that night. On the other hand the months are speeding by so quickly that it is a challenge to actually notice what is happening, who these small people are, who I am. Have I over-scheduled and over-committed the summer? Is this just the season of life I am in? Will I ever feel caught up on sleep EVER?

We have less than one month until Grace starts 1st grade. This will be her first year to be in school all day and I predict that a) she will thrive and do well and b) I will miss her daily company. She is returning to our neighborhood public school after a lovely kindergarten year there. Her kindergarten teacher sounded surprised that we weren't looking into the magnet schools again but Grace had a great year socially and the academic side was acceptable for now, so we'll try another year there and see what happens. It was lovely to see her and her tiny classmates in their construction paper mortar boards as they wrapped up the year. When is the next faux graduation ceremony? After 6th grade when they leave the elementary school, I think?





We will not travel at all this summer but our home city is providing more fun things to do than we could possibly take advantage of. We've been to the aviary and the zoo, Grace did a science camp at the Natural History Museum, both girls have done yoga and art and dance at little morning sessions at the preschool that Violet's been going to, there have swimming lessons and sports camp through the city rec centers, and some days we have to do normal things like shop for groceries or get hair cuts. We have gotten out of the city a little bit, most memorably out to a lovely state park with our church for a weekend of swimming, campfires, and time together. Grace and Rob camped and I drove out for the day Sunday with the two little ones.









I've also been preserving a lot of apricots in various forms: jam galore, halves in syrup, and a first attempt at apricot liqueur. We had a very mild winter followed by an early, warm spring and now a hot summer, so the growing season is about a month ahead of where it was last year and everything is going GANGBUSTERS. I should have kept track of how many apricots I've preserved because it is truly madness. The trees here in Utah are just going crazy this year.



It's good for me to reflect on the things I do enjoy about summer (like all the amazing food) because UGH, it is not my favorite season, especially when it is particularly hot like this year. I am thankful for the gorgeous stone fruit and cucumbers and corn and greens, and for the fact that our house is quite a bit more comfortable than last summer thanks to the replacement of a bunch of windows. We had the original windows on the ground level of our 1917 house (the basement windows are newer) and they did next to nothing to hold the air conditioning in. We replaced a bunch of them on the west side of the house with fancy new ones earlier this month and afternoons are so much more pleasant now. The new windows are pretty cool; the glass has this coating that blocks almost all the infrared radiation but lets almost all the light through. You can stand in a patch of sunlight and feel almost no heat at all. Yay!



Things are moving forward with some of the job possibilities I'm looking into; they're all part-time astronomy education jobs. I will admit that on some of the longest, most tiring days I wonder if I am crazy to be considering returning to paid work right now, if adding another responsibility to my life right now will leave me with even less time to think and energy to cope. However, I feel like the timing (with us settled in Salt Lake, both girls in school/preschool in the fall, and Lewis emerging out of infancy) is good. And sometimes I think structuring my life so I get to do a bit of science education and thinking about astronomy and work for which I am paid genuine US dollars might actually help. I guess we'll see.

Thirty-Four

Today is my birthday and I am 34 years old. Half my life ago, I was here:



Look at 17-year-old me opening a present! It looks like it might be a CD.



And here is 17-year-old me with my friends from 17 years ago (most of whom I still love and hold dear and am in contact with, amazingly) at my birthday party. We have all just finished our junior year of high school and we are playing Taboo.

My mind can hardly wrap around the fact that it's been as long from when I was born to these pictures and it has been from these pictures to now. Does my hair look disturbingly similar to how I have it cut now?

Since my birthday fell on a Sunday this year, I declared this to be birthday weekend and we have been celebrating for several days now. I had a massage (which is, SERIOUSLY, one of my favorite things ever) and we went out to dinner last night at Mazza (here is a blurry Instagram picture that Grace took while there) and tonight we are grilling burgers with Brie and grilled onions and dried cherries and drinking delicious Cabernet that Rob's parents gave us last Christmas. I am having a lovely day.

So what will this, my 35th year here on the planet, bring to our lives? No one can say, but I am thinking these days about the concept of going back to work. Lewis will turn one at the end of the summer and I am starting to feel myself coming out of the fog of his babyhood into the relative clarity of regular me. When Grace turned one, I was teaching as an adjunct in Connecticut and realized that working was finally starting to feel more doable and less stressful; I said to myself that if I could, I would try to take an entire year off if/when we had more babies. When Violet turned one, we were deep in the throes of planning our escape from Dallas so returning to work was far from my mind. Now I'm thinking about it, though, and pondering what my options are here in Salt Lake. My first choice would be to teach as an adjunct again, maybe just starting with one class the first semester back. I've opened up my CV to update it and have been looking into what connections I have to the physics departments at the various universities around town and WE'LL SEE. I'm not sure if this will all come together for the immediate fall semester but perhaps this will be the year that I step back into the world of JOBS.